Turning on the Heat: KAL Flight 007

The static was heavy. The words that sounded above the crackle were an unfamiliar Russian military-aviation jargon. The pilots’ voices were unemotional, as if they were reporting to their ground controllers on the progress of the most routine training exercise. All of which made the tape more eloquently horrifying when it was played in excerpt for a national television audience by President Reagan and in full for the United Nations Security Council by U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. In the translation, the pilot of the Soviet Sukhoi-15 interceptor who fired the missiles that blasted Korean Air Lines Flight 007 out of the skies, killing all 269 people aboard, described the action in part this way:

“I see it, visually and on radar . . . The A.N.O. [air navigational lights] are burning. The [strobe] light is flashing . . . What are instructions? . . . I’m dropping back. Now I will try a rocket . . . I am closing on the target . . . I have executed the launch. The target is destroyed.”

Those terse words echoed louder in the world’s consciousness than the millions of highly emotional ones that came pouring from government offices and the gatherings of ordinary citizens around the globe last week. Many questions about just what happened to Flight 007 remain. But the tape, recorded by the Japan Defense Agency and passed on to the U.S., was damning all the same.

Indeed, within hours after Kirkpatrick had played the tape at the U.N. the Soviets switched their line from “Who, me?” innocence to brazen defiance. Yes, said a statement by the official news agency TASS, the Soviets had “stopped” the flight. The reason, it said, was that although the plane was a civilian jet, it was on a spying mission for the U.S. That was a claim just about nobody outside the Communist world believed.

What was more, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko indicated, the Soviets would do it again. Said he, at an international conference in Madrid: “Soviet territory, the borders of the Soviet Union are sacred. No matter who resorts to provocations of that kind, he should know that he will bear the full brunt of responsibility for it.” Kirkpatrick had already given the U.S. response at the U.N.: “Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations.”

The widespread outrage at the Soviets’ behavior presented the Reagan Administration with a delicate diplomatic problem: how to respond with appropriate indignation without imposing sanctions that would backfire. Counseled by Secretary of State George Shultz, who coolly and competently took charge, Reagan laid down the line even before he returned to Washington on Sept. 2 from a vacation at his ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif. Said the President to National Security Adviser William Clark: “We have to guard against overreaction.” Though Clark had been emerging as a hard-line architect of American foreign policy, he acted only as the “honest broker” in the meetings that shaped the U.S. response, collecting ideas and suggestions from various advisers and laying out choices for the President.

The final position closely followed Shultz’s recommendations, and the Administration quite consciously played up Shultz’s role in presenting it, to the nation and the world. The U.S., Reagan decided, would play the part of prosecutor in the court of world opinion, presenting evidence of wanton Soviet destruction of civilian lives and demanding an accounting. But the U.S. would talk reprisal principally in the area of the crime, the field of civil aviation. The response had to be measured, acceptable to allies and domestic public opinion. This way the dispute would be seen not as a superpower confrontation but as a conflict between the U.S.S.R. and the rest of the world.

This approach was in strong contrast both to Jimmy Carter’s reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when he ordered an embargo on U.S. grain sales to the U.S.S.R. and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and to Reagan’s own response to the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, when he tried a variety of economic sanctions that irritated U.S. allies more than they annoyed the Soviets.

Even before Reagan returned to Washington, an interagency team led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt had considered some 30 possible retaliatory steps, including a broad rupture of diplomatic negotiations with the Soviets, and rejected nearly all of them. The Pentagon proposed at least breaking off the long-running and so far fruitless talks in Vienna with the Soviets on reduction of conventional arms in Europe, and got turned down.

Reagan took the lead with his Labor Day speech. Before he went on TV, the White House had announced that immediate U.S. steps would be mainly symbolic: suspension of negotiations with the Soviets for a new consular agreement and expanded scientific and cultural exchanges, and an appeal to other nations to suspend air service to and from the U.S.S.R. for 60 days. There would be no revocation of the just concluded grain-sales agreement with Moscow, and no delay in arms-control talks. Reagan told his speechwriters he wanted no broad-scale attack on the Soviet Union but rather a speech tightly focused on the airliner atrocity. Nonetheless, of the two drafts on his desk Monday morning, one was too strident and the other too general to please the President. Reagan spent nearly all of Labor Day rewriting.

The speech, as finally delivered, was one of the most effective of Reagan’s presidency. Stern-faced and grim-voiced throughout the 18 minutes, the President indicted the Soviets for a “crime against humanity” that had “absolutely no justification, either legal or moral.” He used the word “massacre” six times to describe it. In a key passage, Reagan asserted, “This attack was not just against ourselves or the Republic of Korea. This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere.

“It would be easy to think in terms of vengeance, but that is not a proper answer,” Reagan continued. In particular, he urged “never giving up our effort to bring peace closer through mutual verifiable reduction in the weapons of war.” So, he said, the U.S., in concert with other nations, would demand a Soviet explanation and apology for the attack, compensation for the families of the victims, and Soviet cooperation in tightening civil-and military-aviation rules to make sure that nothing similar happens again—all legitimate demands that no one expects to be fulfilled. Reagan struck one jarringly inappropriate note by appealing for congressional funding of the MX missile, thus introducing a domestic political controversy into an otherwise carefully balanced speech. But on the whole, his combination of anger and restraint was stirring and statesmanlike.

The dramatic high point of the speech was Reagan’s playing a portion of the tape of the Soviet pilots. The U.S. got that tape from the Japanese government only after Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone had overruled his own intelligence advisers, who wanted to release only summaries. Japanese intelligence officials feared that public playing of the tape would alert the Soviets to their methods of gathering data. It did; by late in the week, Japanese recordings of Soviet pilots’ chatter had dropped two-thirds, because the Soviets had changed their radio frequencies and codes. In both Japan and the U.S., however, political leaders decided the world simply had to be presented with irrefutable evidence of the Soviets’ guilt.

The tape got a full airing at noon Tuesday, in the most theatrical scene at the U.N. Security Council in a generation. The council chamber was dominated by two 21-in. TV screens placed on shoulder-high stands behind the horseshoe-shaped delegates’ desk; three smaller monitors were aimed at the press and visitors’ galleries. When U.S. Ambassador Kirkpatrick rolled the tapes, delegates and visitors could hear on their headsets simultaneous translations in all six official languages at the U.N. The TV screens showed the words of the pilots in Russian and English letters, and a map with moving lines represented the routes of the Korean airliner and the Soviet interceptors.

The session produced a memorable image of Soviet stonewalling: U.S.S.R. Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky staring icily into the distance, his back to a large TV screen directly behind him, while members of his staff twisted around in their seats to look. Troyanovsky had been put in an impossible position by his government, which at that point was admitting nothing. In reply to the playing of the tape, the Soviet Ambassador could only lamely recite a long catalogue of alleged U.S. violations of Soviet airspace. Apparently unknown to him, Moscow was on the point of releasing a TASS statement admitting that the KAL flight had been “stopped.” A few hours later, still looking impassive, Troyanovsky read the new TASS statement to the delegates without comment.

All through the week, despite the chorus of condemnations, U.S. diplomatic contacts with the Soviets continued. On Wednesday, U.S. and Soviet Negotiators Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky arrived in Geneva to resume negotiations aimed at limiting intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. Kvitsinsky brushed aside questions about the downing of the Korean airliner as “not pertinent” to the missile talks. Nitze said that “if the Soviets are prepared to address the basic issues [of the missile bargaining] squarely and honestly, I have the flexibility for real progress.”

The double-barreled U.S. strategy, defined privately by Reagan to aides as “Show our outrage, but keep talking,” reached a climax late in the week in Madrid, at a meeting of foreign ministers of the 35 states that had participated in the three-year Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Working sessions of the conference ended on Tuesday with an agreement that does no more than schedule a series of future conferences and bind the signatories to pledges about human rights, like the right to form free trade unions, that hardly anyone thinks can be enforced. Still, it once seemed an achievement of sorts to produce a document that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were willing to sign, and the Spanish government had invited all 35 foreign ministers to a follow-up session, beginning Wednesday, at which they planned to congratulate each other.

Instead, one diplomat after another took the podium to excoriate the Soviet destruction of Flight 007. Pierre Aubert of neutral Switzerland opened by taking oblique aim at the Soviets, saying that the most useful confidence-building measure would be “to persuade those who believe only in force, even in disrespect for human life, that they are in error.” There was some doubt whether Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko would show up to face the heat. He not only showed up but droned through a standard speech about disarmament. His audience listened anxiously to hear whether Gromyko would mention the airliner. He did, in a few defiant sentences at the end, accusing the U.S. of inspiring “a wave of slander and shameless insinuations against the U.S.S.R.”

In a series of face-to-face private meetings with other foreign ministers, Gromyko was told that the world is not buying this line. Shultz had gone to Madrid specifically to express American condemnation to Gromyko in person. Their session on Thursday was described by Shultz’s aides as “stormy” and “heated.” The Secretary is said to have raged to State Department officials over the transatlantic telephone after the meeting that Gromyko “lies even more in private than he does in public.”

For all the angry rhetoric, however, what actual penalty might the Soviets pay? In immediate, concrete terms, hardly any. Eleven of the 15 non-U.S. members of NATO, meeting in Brussels, announced that they would suspend airline service between their countries and the U.S.S.R. for at least two weeks, beginning Monday. But that falls short of the 60-day suspension asked by the International Federation of Airline Pilots Associations, with the strong support of the U.S., and put into effect by Canada last week. Moreover, France, Greece, Spain and Turkey, at least for the moment, would not go along. The refusal of France, whose government has been as loud in public condemnation of the Soviets as any (“brutal, unqualifiable, shocking, staggering and unbelievable,” said Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson), was especially disappointing and probably explainable mostly in terms of its traditional reluctance to follow a U.S. lead.

In fact, some of the suspensions may be longer than two weeks: pilots in several countries are voting not to fly to the U.S.S.R. for at least 60 days, whatever their governments do. French pilots have joined this action, so air service may, after all, be reduced between Paris and Moscow. The U.S., ironically, has no way to set an example: it suspended landing rights of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, in 1981, and no American airline now flies to the U.S.S.R. Reagan ordered the closing of Aeroflot’s offices in Washington and New York and asked that U.S. airlines stop selling tickets for Aeroflot flights; over a year’s time, the move would affect at most 4,000 to 5,000 passengers and cost Moscow a mere $1.5 million to $2 million.

At a meeting of the 33-nation International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal this week, the U.S. and several other nations will press for a package of measures to guarantee the safety of civilian airliners, including steps to ensure communication between those that wander off course and the military jets that might intercept them. That move might force the Soviets, who are members of I.C.A.O., into the embarrassing position of arguing against safety guarantees; it is most unlikely to win Soviet compliance.

At the U.N., the U.S. will try this week to persuade the Security Council to pass, and force the Soviets to veto, a resolution that “deplores” the shooting down of KAL 007. President Reagan will denounce the attack in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 26.

Outside diplomatic forums, anti-Soviet actions have been so minor that they would be comic if they did not express impotent public fury. In the U.S., at least 18 states are taking action against the sale of Russian vodka in state liquor stores, and the operator of three video games in an arcade on the University of Texas campus in Austin reprogrammed them to feature Soviet targets; one is identified as “Andropov, Communist mutant from outer space.” Six of nine Canadian cities that were to play host to the Moscow State Circus canceled their invitations, causing the circus to call off its whole Canadian tour. Fifty-five Soviet performers, nine horses and five trained bears are now stranded in Halifax, since there will be no flights between Canada and the Soviet Union until November at the earliest.

Memorial services were held, and anti-Soviet demonstrations erupted, throughout the world. In Seoul, the destination of the downed flight, 100,000 people jammed the city’s main stadium for a mourning ceremony. Kim Soo Jee, 13, told the crowd that “it tore my heart apart” to learn that her father, a member of the jetliner’s crew, was never coming home. In Washington, Tryggvi McDonald, 22, eldest son of Georgia Democratic Congressman Larry McDonald, who was on the doomed flight, addressed a placard-waving rally of 750 people in Lafayette Square and later tried to deliver a letter of protest in person at the Soviet embassy; an embassy employee threw it away. Koreans staged demonstrations, some joined by local residents, in cities as distant from their homeland as Buenos Aires. In Paris, a crowd of 300, mostly Koreans, gathered near the Soviet embassy; some tried to charge police barricades.

Dismayed that the immediate penalties to the U.S.S.R. will be no greater, hard-liners in the U.S. were quick to accuse the Reagan Administration of faintheartedness. Richard Viguerie, a major fund raiser for right-wing causes, said the President was “Teddy Roosevelt in reverse. He speaks loudly but carries a small stick.” Viguerie went so far as to voice a not-very-believable threat that staunch conservatives just might sit out a Reagan re-election campaign.

The right’s anger, while understandable, was overstated. Little though governments could find to do to penalize the Soviets, they would be wrong to suppose that the U.S.S.R. is getting off scot free. On the contrary, that nation is paying a very heavy price, though in ways that are hard to measure.

At minimum, the Soviets have suffered a devastating blow to their ability to pose as peace lovers eager for détente and disarmament. The brutality of their action seems to have shocked the world more than the invasion of Afghanistan and the repression in Poland, which were at least explicable as power politics.

The Soviets took a hammering from many countries that are not accustomed to speaking harshly to them: Kenya and Indonesia, for example, issued strong condemnations. In other nations, government statements were soft, but public opinion was not. The Indian government confined itself to a mumbled “sorry for the loss of lives” by a foreign ministry spokesman. But editorials in several newspapers assailed the Soviets, and Subramaniam Swamy, deputy parliamentary leader of the opposition Janata party, vainly called on the government to “clearly and categorically denounce the act of barbarism.”

Soviet attempts to woo the international peace movement clearly have been set back—and the antinuclear movement might be damaged by a wave of you-can’t-trust-the-Soviets feeling. David Corn, a leader of U.S. antinuclear activists, writing an open letter to Andropov in the New York Times, asserted, “Your edge in the propaganda war of peace was shot down when the Korean jetliner fell from the sky … A new ‘get tough’ attitude in the West will hinder our efforts . . . You now have to decide if the Soviet Union really gives a whit about peace and, if so, how to demonstrate that.”

In the U.S., the Soviets have accomplished an effect they certainly could never have intended: weakening congressional opposition to Reagan’s military spending plans. Congressional foes of the MX, for instance, concede they have no hope of cutting off funding now. Says New York Democrat Joseph Addabbo, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee: “I think we had it beat—until this.”

For all its hard-nosed bluster, the Kremlin appears to have realized how bad an impression it was making, and at week’s end made unprecedented efforts at damage control. On Saturday Soviet TV screens showed an interview with an officer described as the pilot, name not given, who had shot down KAL 007; he insisted he had tried to warn it to land. He followed by a day a news conference in Moscow for both Soviet and foreign reporters that was televised live by satellite around the world. The main speaker: Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Soviet Chief of Staff and as such the top professional soldier in the U.S.S.R.

Natty in olive-green uniform with row upon row of military decorations, Ogarkov traced the path of Flight 007 with a long metal pointer on a huge colored map before an overflow audience, which spilled out of the second-floor auditorium of the Novosti building and down the stairs to the mezzanine. As no other Soviet official had done, he admitted in so many words that Soviet fighters had shot down the Korean jet and confirmed Western reports that two air-to-air missiles had done the deed. But his explanation was confusing. He suggested that Soviet ground controllers had mixed up the Korean civilian jet with the U.S. reconnaissance plane that had been in the North Pacific, while at the same time insisting that KAL’s 007 had been on a spying mission for the U.S.

On one point, Ogarkov’s presentation confirmed the speculations of Western Kremlinologists: the order to shoot down the plane was a military decision, not checked with Andropov, who was reported to have been on vacation in the Caucasus, or other Politburo members. The order was given, Ogarkov said, by a commander in the Soviet Far East. Without exactly saying so, Ogarkov indicated that he had been informed only after the Korean liner had been destroyed. That raises a terrifying question: Are Soviet military forces under firm enough control by the Kremlin civilian leadership to prevent their obvious hair-trigger mentality from creating an incident that could start an escalating military clash between the superpowers?

U.S. specialists have been preparing a report on precisely that subject; the document is far from complete, and will be kept secret when it is. But some who have participated described to TIME preliminary conclusions that are mostly, though not entirely, reassuring. To begin with, they assert, the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces operate under an entirely different set of instructions from the air-defense command: only top civilian leaders can give the order to fire a nuclear missile at any target anywhere.

As to air defense, says one official, “we are pretty sure that the Soviets draw a very clear and important distinction between the use of force within their own territory and outside . . . They take the view that they can do anything they damn well please, and do it almost reflexively, if it’s within their own territorial sovereignty.” But he adds, “We’ve got reason to believe that those interceptors are on a tight leash” that would yank them back from pursuing an intruding plane into international airspace.

What if an American plane had wandered into Soviet airspace? U.S. experts concede that Soviet interceptors might shoot it down, and without telling Andropov, but add that that would not start a superpower military clash. Says one: “We’d scream bloody murder and maybe take some very serious political steps, but we would not take direct military action in reprisal. The Soviet air defense may be on hair trigger, but no aspect of our military is.” A final, and chilling, possibility is that the Soviets might down a plane they considered to be over their territory but the U.S. insisted was in international skies. A U.S. intelligence official says, “That’s very technical and very delicate.”

Diplomatically, it is possible—barely—that some good might come out of the fiery end of Flight 007. Gromyko at week’s end hinted to West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher at possible Soviet flexibility in the European missile talks. He indicated that the Soviets might consider British and French missiles, or some of them, as strategic weapons—which the West insists they are—and thus not count all of them when determining how many medium-range nuclear weapons are to be permitted to each side. Genscher cautioned that “we will have to wait and see” just what Gromyko meant. Conceivably, the Soviets realize they must make some concessions so as not to let the revulsion over the Korean jet freeze all diplomatic progress.

Whether or not the fatal flight of KAL 007 sets in motion any vital alterations in superpower relations, it has provided a remarkable flash of illumination into the workings of the Soviet mind and the Soviet system. Much of the world goes about its business more or less equally skeptical of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., no matter the starkly differing values prevailing in the two societies. In the act over the skies of the Pacific and in its reaction to it, Moscow almost compulsively undid itself. Consider Marshal Ogarkov’s reply to this, one of the sharpest of several pointed questions posed by Western reporters at his press conference: “If the Soviet Union bears no guilt in this affair, as you have said today, why have you not yet told your own people that 269 people died?” Answered Ogarkov, eyes narrowing in annoyance: “How would we know how many people were aboard this plane? We were not estimating at all that we were dealing with a passenger plane . . . This is a piece of information known to those who staged the flight. Let them figure it out on their own.”

—By George J. Church.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Bruce van Voorst/United Nations, with other bureaus